Contemplative Landscapes
In so doing she brings her gesture to an extreme synthesis and conveys the concept of infinity into the landscape. The landscape is everywhere. The Belgian artist dismantles the idea of a neoclassical landscape, or to stay in Venice, she does not depict a veduta like Canaletto, an illuminist reproduction, the expression of technical ability. Instead, imagination prevails over observation. The theme of infinity refers by analogy to Giacomo Leopardi's poetics (1798 - 1837), to the homonymous Canto, in whose verses the romantic poetics of nature is condensed: the contrast between the horizon limited by the hedge and the "endless spaces" that the mind can imagine introduces the theme of the evocative power of vision, so frequent in the artistic expression of the romantic age.
Thus in the landscapes contemplated by Isabel Devos, the hedges become walls, and the "endless spaces" become the landscapes she sublimated.
That’s how the light gets in
Just like the work That’s how the light gets in which turns a typical subject of her production (the landscape generated by the action of water on concrete) into its negative. Or again, the work What if white was the dark side in which the search for white as a subject is obtained with the cyanotype technique. As per T’ai Chi T’u tradition, Isabel opposes the principle of Yang (white) with the one of Yin (black), well represented by the artwork on lightbox Errata.
Here respecting a vertical vision of the landscape, Isabel is inspired by the rusted surfaces of the doors to represent cloudy skies. A work that once again takes up the vein of the sublimation of the landscape, typical of her early works. A detail of a surface is sufficient to recreate a view (veduta). The landscape is everywhere in Isabel Devos' work.
-> Urbanautica — Oriental Hints
I would like
It started as a birthday present. From Isabel, for Sara. An intimate performance with photography — Isabel's medium — as its starting point. A game with the imagination, between being seen and not being seen, between intimacy and eroticism.
Sara made an answer to Isabel. A performance about the gaze.
About the difference between naked and nude, about lust subject and object. About showing and not showing, shame and sensuality. The dialogue resonated further in the minds of Isabel and Sara. This felt so precise.
What if they shared this with others? An invitation to artist friends followed. Isabel and Sara performed, each time for very small groups, in the privacy of a naked derelict space. Fine reactions came from the artists. That it felt very special, that intimacy in times of skin hunger. And whether they could also formulate a response? Like a silent sensual chain letter, the idea expanded, from artist to artist. The answers took their own form: performance, theatre, art...
A conversation ensued. Not only about intimacy and erotic imagination, but also about the beauty of playing for a small audience, averse to numbers and returns. Is there still room for such formats in the performing arts? Can it be less, rather than always more? Is this a performance at all, or a performance in edition?
Tim Vanheers, 2020, Ghent
First Art Kit
The previous week I looked at some of the artworks made by other participating artists.
By this means the content of first art kit was known to me.
At the end of that week, it was a Sunday, I heard that the health of my 88 years old father was rapidly getting worse.
I drove to my father realizing that I was going to help him at the last stage of his life.
I thought of the box but decided that it was inappropriate considering the circumstances, to bring in a red box, with the inscription first art kit in my fathers room.
While doing some research on the website of first art kit I mostly remembered the following quote: “If providing art would be considered to be some kind of first aid, what would be my role as an artist then?”
I decided not to use any material content of this box but to let myself be inspired by the title of this project.
I know these days would be the last aid of my fathers last days, my role as a daughter and an artist is to see beauty and to be grateful of these moments.
Isabel Devos, March 2015
Pretending
She made the "Rock Scales" series using the "Wet Collodium" technique, a photographic process in which a light-sensitive layer is poured onto a glass plate and processed immediately. In this way, she not only takes us to the time when photography came into existence (circa 1850), but also to the period in which early Victorian travelers gathered images from around the world, who wanted to consolidate their conquests with this imagination. "Seeing is believing". Yet Devos' images are in fact scale models that in turn refer to the microcosm in nature and the oddities of the nineteenth-century explorers. A theme that was highlighted earlier in her oeuvre.
The choice to present the original collodium plates and not a photographic print is, therefore, the right form for this exhibition in this Italian glass workshop (s). These images of a rock formation on glass are only visible through the underlying presence of real matter, namely black natural stone.
These pioneering years of photography heralded the end of the ivory tower ideology. Romanticists such as Caspar David Friedrich, with his well-known work "The walker above the mists" (1818), saw the acceleration of society, the industrialization of crafts in black. It was a turbulent time in which new sciences and philosophies emerged. Just think of Nietzsche's “Der Wille zur Macht”, which deals with the fundamental driving force of man to dominate, to control, to roam and to rule nature. This steady evolution, at first sight, brought prosperity for everyone, but it is actually the impetus and cause for, among other things, social inequality, mass consumption and the current climate problem. And that is precisely what Isabel Devos deliberately raises with us through her art.
The Swallows
->The Art Couch — The Swallows